


burn and keep quiet

by softnow



Category: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (TV)
Genre: F/M, Guilt, Missions Gone Wrong, Sexual Tension, Tight Spaces, Trapped In A Closet, Unresolved Romantic Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-02
Updated: 2018-05-02
Packaged: 2019-05-01 03:34:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14511654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softnow/pseuds/softnow
Summary: Is that what this is? Is she Reese Witherspoon? Was the elevator not good enough? Too much room for personal space? Did the big movie director in the sky decide to try again, somewhere smaller this time, where there’s no escaping the scent of his cologne and the warmth of his body and the feel of his skin and—





	burn and keep quiet

**Author's Note:**

> title is taken from [this](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/460006-to-burn-with-desire-and-keep-quiet-about-it-is) frederico garcía lorca quote.  
> inspired by [this](https://softnow.tumblr.com/post/173507407038/23-we-have-to-be-quiet) prompt from [lozkelly](lozkelly.tumblr.com) on tumblr.

Of all the things Nathaniel Plimpton III has done to her—buying out her boss, kicking her out of her office, threatening to fire her friends, seducing her in an elevator—Rebecca thinks this might be the cruelest.

For starters, she has a wedding to plan and about two billion pieces of ribbon at home, waiting to be tied into bows for the mason jar candle holders, and the mason jar confetti holders, and the mason jar utensil holders. And what’s more, it’s a Friday night, when she should be with her fiancé and her best friend and miles away from her asshole boss kneeling in the dirt, picking the lock on the back door of the Fifth Street Soup Kitchen.

“Nathaniel!” she whisper-shouts, frantically surveying the parking lot to make sure nobody is coming. “This is  _illegal!_ ”

“Says the girl who exhumed dead bodies to blackmail a cemetery,” he says, not looking up from the tools he’s using to jimmy the lock.

“Well, technically it was Paula who did most of the exhuming, but that’s—that’s different!”

“How?” he asks, standing and brushing the dirt from his knees. He opens the door with a flourish, beckons her in with an  _after you_  gesture. “You knew the cemetery was in the wrong and needed the evidence for a client. I don’t see how this is any different.”

Rebecca huffs, casting her flashlight around the darkened kitchen. One of their biggest accounts, Ransom Dodge-Toyota, a new and used car lot down the road, wants to expand. They’d been on Fifth Street Soup to sell for months, but the kitchen has continually refused, no matter how hard Plimpton, Plimpton, and Plimpton (and Whitefeather & Associates) dogged them. Ransom was getting antsy, and Nathaniel was worried they were close to backing out, and it just so happened that he’d recently gotten a tip that the good folks down on Fifth Street were dealing a bit more than soup.

“Still,” she says. “I don’t know why you needed me for this. Couldn’t you have sent Tim? Or George?”

“Oh, come on, Rebecca, you’re smarter than that,” Nathaniel says in that chiding tone she hates so much. “Tim and George would just screw everything up. As much as it pains me to say it, you’re the best I have. I mean, you  _did_  do a good job with the cemetery case.”

She follows him to the small office at the back of the kitchen, simultaneously offended and perversely flattered.

“Plus,” Nathaniel adds, his voice overly casual and his attention fixed on the desk in the center of the room. “I figured, you know, you could probably use some overtime, with the wedding and all.”

Rebecca blinks. “Wow, that’s…not awful.” He shoots her a bemused smile, an eyebrow quirked. For a moment she can almost hear him saying,  _Don’t be a dick_. Then his eyes drop back to the drawer he’s searching, and she wanders to a file cabinet next to the window.

“How’s that going, anyway?” he asks, still perfectly polite. “Pulling off a wedding in two weeks?”

She takes out a file, leafs through it without really seeing anything. She thinks about this morning and how she cried—just a little, an understandable amount for a bride-to-be—when she realized she’d ordered brown yarn instead of twine, which is not, as one might suspect, the same thing at all.

“Oh, it’s great,” she says. “Yeah, so great. It’s so much fun and—and satisfying. Honestly, I think more people should plan their weddings in two weeks. It’s thrilling. Like a rollercoaster. So exhilarating.”

“Yeah,” Nathaniel says, drawing out the word. There’s an edge in his voice, something close to mocking. “Wow, sounds great. And Josh? He’s being helpful?”

“ _So_  helpful,” she says. “Or, at least, when he’s there. I mean, he’s just been so busy lately with work, and church basketball, and that’s really important, you know? Helping kids shoot hoops for Jesus.” She mimes a free-throw. “That’s…big. This stuff—wedding, crafty, artsy stuff—it’s not really his thing, but that’s okay, because he trusts me. And loves me. And trusts me.”

“Sounds convincing.” He closes a drawer and turns to the desktop computer, shaking the mouse to wake the monitor.

Rebecca’s forehead wrinkles in frustration. Her mouth opens, closes. She shoves the file in her hand back into the file cabinet.

“Are you sure they’re even dealing, you know—?” She puts a finger to her nose and sniffs, crosses her eyes like she’s dizzy.

“Pretty sure, but not entirely. That’s why we’re here. To find something that proves they’re—wait, what would you say?—a bunch of filthy, flimflamming dope peddlers?”

He gives her a smile—a genuine one, with no hint of malice—and Rebecca can’t help herself. She barks out a laugh and claps a hand over her mouth.

“Is that your impression of me?” she asks, giggling through her fingers.

He shrugs, mock-humble.

Her shoulders heave as she fights to get herself under control. He watches her, smiling. There’s a softness around his eyes that she doesn’t want to interpret, something gentle and pleased. As her laughter dies away, a palpable silence fills the room between them. His smile falters, but his eyes—big and intense and  _so blue_  even in this gloomy flashlight-darkness—never leave hers.

Rebecca’s feet take a half-step towards the desk on their own accord. Nathaniel pivots in the desk chair, tracking her movement. She takes another step. He leans forward by a fraction. The back of her hand brushes the corner of the desk.

And the room is thrown into sharp relief, headlights cutting through the gauzy curtains over the window.

Nathaniel’s jerks, leaping up from the chair, and Rebecca looks from the window to him with saucer-like eyes.

“We have to g—”

“No time,” he says. He grabs her by the wrist and pulls her around the desk, opening the door to a closet and shoving her inside. It’s small and mostly empty, only a few cardboard boxes stacked in the corner. There’s just enough room for two. He steps in after her and pulls the door shut as they hear the door to the kitchen—the one he picked—open.

They click off their flashlights.

Without the light, the closet is entirely dark, the sort of dark that makes your eyes hurt to look at. Rebecca’s heartbeat sounds too loud in her ears.

“This is  _your fault_ ,” she hisses, stabbing a finger in the direction she thinks is his chest. “Breaking and entering, are you  _stupid?_  If we go to jail—!”

Nathaniel’s hand claps over her mouth as footsteps approach.

“We have to be  _quiet_ ,” he whispers, his words barely more than a puff of air.

They stand there, barely breathing, his large hand cupping the bottom half of her face. They hear the click of the light switch. A thin golden line appears around the edge of the door, bright enough to ease some of the discomfort of the darkness but not enough to allow Rebecca to see anything.

Beside her, Nathaniel shifts. She feels him lean in to the door, listening. His other hand, the one not currently becoming damp with the perspiration of her breath, comes to rest casually on her lower back.

Rebecca stiffens, thinks,  _this is not happening._  She hears Paula’s voice in her head.  _It’s happened to Reese Witherspoon, like, eight times._

Is that what this is? Is she Reese Witherspoon? Was the elevator not good enough? Too much room for personal space? Did the big movie director in the sky decide to try again, somewhere smaller this time, where there’s no escaping the scent of his cologne and the warmth of his body and the feel of his skin and—

 _No._  No. No, no, no. She is  _not_  going there. She shakes her head to clear it like an Etch-a-Sketch and rubs her mouth against his palm in the process. Okay, no, bad plan. She stands perfectly still instead, making her body into a statue. A perfectly still statue, cold and stony and definitely not feeling any tingles in her stony statue lady limbs. Nope.

On the other side of the closet door, a drawer opens. The mouse clicks. The desk chair creaks under somebody’s weight.

On this side of the closet door, Nathaniel’s thumb moves against her back. She passes it off as a twitch, but then it happens again. And again. And again, until he’s drawing small, gentle circles there.

 _Statue. Stony. Stony, stony statue._  Rebecca squeezes her eyes shut and focuses on the mantra, focuses on keeping her muscles rigid. But then he begins to apply a subtle pressure, and she finds herself wondering if he’s taken massage classes before, because that’s really nice, actually, and she  _has_  been tense lately, and her body begins to relax into his touch.

His hand skims up her back, pausing to rub one of her shoulders. Then he brushes his fingertips down her arm, his touch feather-light. She feels her skin reacting, waking up as if for the first time in days. She shifts her weight and leans into the touch.

She feels Nathaniel straighten beside her, and then his mouth is at her ear, his lips brushing the lobe, his words electricity and wind.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if we had an invisibility cloak right now?” he whispers.

Rebecca takes a long, slow breath, and she can feel it when he smiles against her. Cocky bastard, thinking he can get her that easily.

She grabs the hand on her mouth and pulls it away, tilting her face to lay her cheek along his. A few days’ worth of stubble scratches at her and she can feel it all the way down to her toes.

“I don’t know,” she whispers back, teasing the shell of his ear with her lips. “I’d settle for a nice, big wand.”

Nathaniel makes a satisfyingly undignified, muted sound low in his throat. His hands find her hips and pull her firmly against him. Outside, the keyboard continues to report rapid bursts of typing, but Rebecca barely registers it. Her world has shrunk to approximately four square feet. She rubs her hands over his chest, feeling the firmness of his muscles, the way they jerk under her touch, before gripping his neck.

The air in the closet is warm, humid, tight. It presses in on her, cradles her, makes her feel a little lightheaded. Makes it easy to forget why this is such a bad idea.

He turns his head at the same time she does, and their mouths come together easily. It’s different from their first kiss, softer. They’re both aware—vaguely—of how important it is to be silent. She fits his bottom lip between both of hers, testing, teasing.

Their last kiss was all pressure, the collision of two orbiting planets. But this… This is fired glass, liquid and raw.

Rebecca presses up onto her toes to get closer, and he helps her, his arms wrapping around her back to support her. He meets her for another chaste kiss and then opens his mouth to her, melting into her as she melts into him. Her hands wind into his hair, nails scrape gently over his scalp, and she feels him shudder against her.

He kisses her until she feels gooey and dumb, all thoughts having packed their bags and headed for the hills. Then he tears his mouth from hers and peppers hot, open-mouthed kisses along her her jaw. He swipes her hair behind her shoulder and secures it against her head with his hand. He kisses her ear and then drops to her neck, finding the pulse point and sucking.

Rebecca takes a rugged breath and exhales a soft moan. Nathaniel freezes. His grip on her tightens.

“ _Shhh_ ,” he breathes and shifts her backwards until her back touches the wall, moving in slow motion so as to not make any noise.

Outside, a file cabinet drawer slams. They both jump, and then Nathaniel’s on her again, kissing her like a drowning man trying to reach the shore. His hands find the hem of her shirt and hover there.

“Can I?” he whispers against her mouth.

She nods, not trusting herself to speak, not trusting herself not to moan his name the way she  _so_  wants to. It’s there, strangled at the back of her throat, and she’s afraid if she stops kissing him for even a moment, it will push its way out and ruin everything.

Nathaniel’s hands dive beneath her shirt, pushing up, up, sliding beneath her bra, cupping her breasts. She jerks and rolls her hips, finds him hard and wanting against her stomach.

Some distant—very, very distant—part of her brain wonders if this is such a good idea. One  _rando_   _kiss_  in an elevator is one thing; it was late, their defenses were down. There was the wind. But this… This is a different sort of thing altogether, the sort of thing she moved her wedding up to avoid, the sort of thing that could ruin her forever.

But then Nathaniel’s fumbling with the button on her jeans with one hand while the other continues to massage her breast, and he’s kissing her hard enough to bruise, and his fingers are skimming along her overheated skin, testing the waters, if you will, and she loses all cognitive ability.

“Can you be quiet?” he whispers into the hollow beneath her ear. His breath is rough and hot.

She bites her lip and nods.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she manages, a single exhale of air, and then his fingers curl into her and his mouth comes over hers to swallow the sound of her gasp.

He works her deftly, like he’s a well-trained musician and she’s his favorite instrument. Her hips rock, searching for the right friction. When she finds it, her head falls back, and a choked sound builds somewhere behind her teeth. She clings to his shoulders, and he replaces his mouth with his other hand once again, pressing firmly to keep her silent.

She doesn’t know if her eyes are opened or closed, but it doesn’t matter, because all she knows in this moment is him. His overheated skin, his long fingers, his hungry mouth that seems to be everywhere at once—this is what makes up her entire universe.

Her climax washes in like the sea, wave upon wave of rolling pleasure, and Nathaniel buoys her through it with the attention and skill of a long-time lover. When she finally comes down, she sags against him. Her legs feel not altogether present, like perhaps they’ve been detached and hidden here in the dark somewhere.

He keeps her pinned to the wall with his body. His hand slips from her mouth to cradle her jaw, and his lips find hers once more in the darkness. The kiss is unhurried and gentle, a stark contrast to the way he’d devoured her only moments ago.

She may be sated and soft, but she can feel him, and he’s anything but. Her hands fall to his waist, sliding along his belt, and he gasps into her mouth when she takes ahold of the buckle.

On the other side of the door, the desk chair creaks. There’s a  _whiss_  as it’s pushed in, then footsteps. The one-two click of the light switch and the doorknob follow. The sliver of golden light framing the closet door disappears, and they freeze, listening.

A minute passes. Two. No sound.

“I think they’re gone,” Nathaniel murmurs, his voice low and rough. It makes her ache.

“Mm..hmm. Yeah.”

“We need to get out of here.”

He moves away from her and the air that rushes to fill the space he’d occupied is cold, sobering. His flashlight clicks on, and Rebecca is momentarily blinded. When her eyes adjust, she sees him leaning against the door, ear to the wood, checking. Her stomach clenches.

He looks like he’s been through a wind tunnel. His hair, normally so neat, juts in all directions. His shirt is rumbled, halfway untucked, and when did the top two buttons come undone? Rebecca tries to remember and can’t. His mouth is red, lips swollen and damp. When he meets her gaze, his eyes are heavy and a little unfocused.

The realization crushes her like a cow tossed from the tornado of her own self-hate. They just— He just—  _She_  just…

Nathaniel must see it on her face, because he carefully schools his features and straightens his shirt, retucking it as best he can with one hand.

“I think we’re clear,” he says and pushes the door open.

They both tense, but the office is empty. They spill from the closet. Rebecca glances down and feels her throat tighten with shame. Her pants are still undone. She zips and snaps them with shaking fingers.

With her back to him, she forces out, as evenly as she can, “What about the evidence?”

“Forget it,” he says. “This was obviously a bad plan.”

He means because they almost got caught breaking and entering, she’s sure. And yet there’s a twinge in her gut like small, icy knife when she considers what  _else_  he could mean. Which makes no sense, because she shouldn’t care if he thinks that was a mistake. Because it absolutely, one hundred percent  _was_  a mistake. A horrible mistake. An awful, stupid, intense, thrilling, mind-blowing mistake that she’s definitely not going to think about later in the shower as she—

Needs to leave. Right now.

Nathaniel follows her out into the night, taking care to lock the door behind them. She’s halfway to the sidewalk, making a beeline for her car stashed inconspicuously in the parking lot of a church down the street, when he catches up to her.

“Rebecca—”

“Nope,” she says, not slowing, not looking at him. “We’re not doing this.”

“Hmm, too late for that,” he says.

His tone is infuriatingly casual, ridiculously smug, and she spins on her toe to jab a finger into his chest as she says, “Nothing. Happened. Okay?  _Nothing_. We did  _nothing_.”

Nathaniel holds his hands up in submission, but he doesn’t look chastised one bit, and his hair is still mussed, and she can _not_  look at him right now. She resumes her angry speed-walk, shoulders hunched, hands balled into swinging fists at her sides. He doesn’t try to stop her. She doesn’t acknowledge the disappointment blooming in her ribcage.

She’s at her car when he calls out into the night, “Oh, have fun with your  _wedding planning!_  Hope it’s as satisfying as doing  _nothing!_ ”

Rebecca flips him off with both hands before flinging herself into the driver’s seat and slamming the door. She doesn’t look in the rearview mirror as she peels out of the parking lot. Just like she doesn’t think about the patch of skin where her neck meets her shoulder that is red and raw from his scruff.

She doesn’t sleep at all when she gets home. She stays up all night, ties two hundred mason jar bows. She only cries twice. She tells herself it’s the most fun she’s ever had.


End file.
